Cowboy
by goldang
Summary: Jack lies about a lot of things. (Newsies a/b/o universe)
1. Chapter 1

Newsies in an a/b/o universe.

Obviously do not read if that combination appalls you.

* * *

><p>Jack Kelly differentiated at the Refuge. He was maybe thirteen. Maybe twelve. He didn't know, exactly.<p>

The boy sharing his bed was Crud Finney. Crud was six or so and scared. But Punsly Schultz knew what was happening. He got up and told Crud to swap bunks and Crud didn't want to do it; he was scared Snyder would notice. But Puns was already a tall, lanky seventeen, and he pulled Crud easily out of the bunk and said, "Beat it and go guard the door, or the one you'll have to be scared of is me."

So Crud did that. And then Puns crawled onto the top bunk where Jack was, which none of the other boys could see up into, being so much smaller than Puns was. Puns put a hand dramatically on Jack's forehead, like he was feeling for a temperature. Jack couldn't figure out why he was doing it. Jack didn't feel sick. Or at least not like how sick was supposed to feel.

He felt intense down below, down where his nightshirt was riding up, and he knew he was hot all over but he couldn't think about that. His body hurt, especially down there, but down there it felt like something else too. Almost a feeling like he was heavy and empty at the same time, and his penis was slick and leaking and upright, and then further back, behind that, he felt something in a place he had never felt anything before. Like he had to go, right then. From right where it hurt so much.

Puns Schultz touched him there with his right hand, while his left hand still rested soothingly on Jack's forehead and he said indistinct things about a bad fever. His fingers worked cleverly under the nightshirt, and Jack felt a rush of wet and then, briefly, some buzzing respite. A small relief.

"Don't tell nobody, Francis," Puns said. "For your own good. Don't tell nobody."

* * *

><p>Denton was of course a beta. All respectable people were.<p>

But the other men at the Sun were almost disappointed about it. Because Denton had been to war. And nothing ought to make a man differentiate like a war.

"Sorry to disappoint you," Denton told them wryly one morning, dropping by the office with his latest. A piece on the murder of a Bowery cigar shop owner. Not his usual line; Denton was supposed to be doing local interest at that time. But then Denton had friends in high places.

"You sure the Governor didn't differentiate?" said Grand, who did the local politics section. "Now that would be a story."

Nearly everyone present laughed uproariously. Not Denton. But everyone else.

"Teddy Roosevelt differentiate?" said van Kirk, who ran the society pages. Disbelief colored his voice. "Not possible. The only people who do that are-"

"Soldiers, brave men," Denton said evenly. "Men the governor respects."

"Can't be that brave if they got hold of what ails the convict and the shoeshine boy," Grand said, flippant.

"Are the convict and the shoeshine boy especially cowardly in your eyes?" Denton said. "In mine they aren't."

"No?" Grand said, like he was exchanging a funny joke with someone who wouldn't quite get it.

"Not necessarily," said Denton.

* * *

><p>After Mayer's accident things became hard, very hard. And the first person to try and fix things wasn't David, because David had to keep going to school, that was paramount. The first person to try was his mother, who was soon fired from the factory because she couldn't work fast enough. And then it was Sarah, who kept a job a little longer but who, in the end, punched the foreman when he groped her. So she was sent back home with no pay, and things became even harder.<p>

Les was offered a job washing dishes in the back room of a bar on Lafayette street. No one wanted him to take it. He took it for a few days but was caught daydreaming. The barman boxed his ears. He lost the job.

Things got harder. But David kept going to school.

Until one night something odd happened. Sarah and Mayer lay in their beds and howled and howled, and when David tried to touch Sarah to calm her his mother came in and shoved him away. Esther Jacobs said, "Don't," like he had been about to do something terrible, and then she'd shook Les awake and told them both to run for Dr. Bloom.

So they did. The doctor came and looked at Sarah and Mayer, and asked lots of personal questions. And when they told him about the accident, and the groping, and how they hadn't had anything today but some watery coffee, and nothing the day before that except watery coffee either, and how the landlord would be throwing them out soon, and how neither Mayer nor Sarah wanted to eat (so that the boys could), the doctor nodded.

He explained what happened sometimes, when things got too hard. New teeth. New senses. Changes in places nobody respectable would know about.

Mayer and Sarah weren't respectable people. Not anymore.

They weren't betas anymore. And if the rest of the family wasn't careful, it would happen to them too.

David left school. He had to find work.

* * *

><p>Now when Jack Kelly met Dave Jacobs he talked up his abilites. And David gave him a skeptical look.<p>

But Crutchie, who knew better, pointed out that Jack was the best.

And, low, in Dave's ear so only he could hear, he said, "He's an alpha, see."

David turned around and stared at him. Crutchie nodded his funny-looking, amiable face, and he gave one of his funny-looking, amiable smiles.

It made sense to Crutchie. Everybody knew about alpha Jack Kelly. Jack could smell out a sucker at fifty paces: his nose was that good, maybe as good as Spot Conlon's. And when the Delanceys came to rough up the weaker boys, there was Jack Kelly flashing them a smile with those sharp incisors of his, real dogs' teeth like he had. He knew all the best spots, and could mark out his territory and fight for it. That was maybe too animal-like for the Astors and Vanderbilts of the world, but for Jack and the newsies it was fine.

For the newsies to be an alpha was a gift, even. No shame in being an alpha. Differentiation wasn't common - most people died when they went through it, or died from whatever was bringing it about, starvation or disease or abuse, and the boys that survived were shipped off to the Refuge almost as a matter of course. But still. If you had to differentiate, an alpha was what you ought to be. A fighter.

"He could be huntin' pretty-skirted, soft little omegas from here to Canarsie with his time," said Racetrack Higgins, who was always hearing things in odd places and therefore had picked up on what Crutchie had said. "Instead Jack's offering to help you."

"Fifty-fifty," David said.

* * *

><p>Within the day, he realized that since Sarah was an omega now, and Jack was an alpha, that was something. That was something big and possible.<p>

And he liked Jack anyway. In spite himself. In spite of the niggling feeling he had that Jack was almost compulsively dishonest.

Anyway he knew that Jack would come down to fifty-fifty when he met the family. Jack didn't seem like he'd deny them in person.

Mayer and Sarah both smelled the alpha on Jack right away, and so that was why they took to him so quick, David figured. That and that Jack was easy to like. Les worshipped him already. This was not sensible, David felt, but it was understandable. When Jack smiled it was wild, lupine, with teeth too sharp. But there was something in his eyes that was not so dangerous, really.

Something hidden. Secret.

* * *

><p>Pulitzer and Hearst were at war and it was a very stressful business. But they wouldn't have dreamed of differentiating. People of their caliber did not differentiate. Pulitzer and Hearst both felt that they had too much self-control and value to ever let themselves become animals.<p>

And it was never even on the table for them. They had never starved. No one had ever shamed them and beaten them. Real misery was not a thing they knew.

That was what it took. Differentiation was a kind of defense. It was supposed to make people better equipped to face down impossible circumstances.

Sometimes it failed, though, and made them omegas instead.


	2. Chapter 2

Medda Larkson, the Swedish meadowlark, never revealed what had made her an omega. And, politely enough, no one asked. Medda was gaiety and light; she had spring in her laugh. Even her prominent canines and the strange way she could prick up her ears made her seem less like an animal danger and more like a mountain nymph, albeit a mountain nymph on the Bowery. Unlike the other local beauties, there was something appealingly natural to Medda.

She hadn't really known Joseph Sullivan. Only seen him sometimes when Joe was working at McGuirk's Suicide Hall. Well, like the Suicide Hall Joe was no good, so they took him to the Tombs and then up to his permanent residence, out on a bare and barred little island in the middle of the river. But Francis stayed. He was six or so. Medda knew him and liked him. He'd been working for years and only occasionally materialized, dirty and small with bright eyes, reading something lewd (he peddled papers and could read; Joe was sometimes proud, sometimes scornful about it) or something Western, on his father's knee in the Suicide Hall. But only when the stars aligned. Only then did one see Francis. Joe had to remember he existed, and then Joe had to be able to track him down. This was a rare combination.

So the only people who knew about Francis were McGuirk and Medda and Edie Ruskin, Joe's most enduring fling, the belle of Canal. And maybe Tom Powers, Joe's old drinking buddy. And then McGuirk was killed in his own suicide hall, and Edie Ruskin bled out in the abortionist backroom, and Tom inevitably got twenty years for something. So only Medda knew about Francis after that.

Francis was in the Refuge for the better part of a year, and in that time Medda scraped together enough to buy her hall. In the day and evening, she sang to crowds of enraptured men come down from Astor Place. And at night she slept easy - often alone now, except when she needed an alpha - in the back rooms above the stage, where the noise from the bums couldn't penetrate. But one night she heard another noise instead. And when she crept downstairs with her pistol there he was, eating her licorice whips like he was famished, which he probably was. Dirty and tall now, like against all odds a growth spurt had hit in the Refuge. He was beginning haltingly to fill out, though it looked like it would still take him three or four more years to look like a man. But he was getting there. Already he looked an awful lot like Joe.

And there was something else. Something she had smelled all the way upstairs, that hadn't exactly seemed dangerous. Medda inhaled again. .

She gathered up her skirts and put the pistol down, approached him cautiously. She knew he could smell her too. He turned. She looked down at him kindly. "You're-" she began.

"Jack," said Francis Sullivan. "Jack Kelly."

He smiled. In the light of her lamp she could make out a whole new person. Not only did he smell different, but there was a wildness to him now. Something feral, not yet tamed, something that – against all odds - appealed.

"Alright, Jack," Medda said.

* * *

><p>Denton wondered if Jack Kelly really was an alpha.<p>

It was near-impossible for a normal human to tell. Betas just didn't have the nose for it. If you were observant and knew what to look for, you could tell something was off. But even then an alpha was much like an omega, and anyway outside the slums of New York (where one might see as many as three differentiated a week), any person with prominent canines and an odd otherness to them was just that: odd. In the poorer areas of the South maybe you would find enough alphas or omegas to become practiced at spotting them. Or maybe in the hardy farmsteads and bitter winters of the midwest.

But probably not. Only in New York were there so many starving, miserable people that enough survived differentiation, so that they became a common part of the landscape. In Sioux Falls and Savannah and Santa Fe, people probably wouldn't be able to pick out a real differentiated from a normal human. In fact it was considered a credit to this great nation that, barring some cases at Valley Forge and during the Civil War and among slaves and Indians years ago, Americans were mostly fortunate enough not to differentiate. Not like the old starving masses of Europe.

The immigrant problem, according to the men at the office. When those masses came over and differentiated they inevitably became immigrant Bowery omega madams, or illiterate Irish alpha drunks. There was a popular myth that real Americans would naturally become god-fearing prairie omegas, raising children in the harsh conditions out West, like in Ms. Wilder's books. Or even better: tough, unstoppable alpha cowboys, like the Virginian. Or best yet: wouldn't differentiate at all.

"Just get it right," said cowboy Kelly. "Kelly. Jack Kelly."

He smiled. He wanted no pictures, but there at the table he looked like a front page piece. Him, David, Les. Two normal enough children, plainly human and regular and easy to sympathize with.

And Jack. Whatever he was, there was something appealing about him.

* * *

><p>Spot Conlon had been normal enough, a dockside boy, harmless, pretty eyed like his mother, never squirming at the language, the roughness, the nakedness of the sailors. He was often down at the pier where all the big ships were and there were too many merchant bodyguards for there to be serious fights. His friends were boys like Fingers Donnelly, who despite his name never stole a thing, and Albert Higgins, who could have gone to school he was so smart.<p>

They used to sit on the pier and drum up business for their mothers, shoot marbles. Albert knew Italian since his mother was from Naples; he could reel in all kinds with that ability, and Fingers could make them laugh, and Spot was sweet, people thought. But not too sweet. Once he'd looked out across the water and seen two boys toss in a struggling alley cat with rocks tied to its legs.

"Bet you it'll be drowned in ten," he said to Albert, although Albert's mother didn't like him taking bets (but Spot knew Bert was crazy for it. He would bet on anything. Spot thought it was funny to indulge him.)

"Less," Bert said uncomfortably. "It's struggling, so it's gonna drown faster. But I don't wanna take that bet." (The first and last time he would ever say this.)

And Spot let it go. He was mostly a good kid then.

When he was made an alpha he was no good anymore. His brothers and sisters, starving and hollow-cheeked and runty as he was, had all had the good grace to die. They didn't make it past the fever. But he did. And his mother conferred with the other working girls, and with Mr. Wallach, the department store owner who'd seen her and promised her so much if only he didn't have a wife and she didn't have all those children. And before the week was out Mrs. Wallach had been sent to upstate indefinitely. And feral little Spot had been drugged with department store cocoa and tossed into the canal with weighted shoes.

Like a street cat.

His mother didn't do it. A gang out of Red Hook did the job, and thought nothing more of it. The kid, as far as they knew, couldn't swim.

But he was a fast learner. Very fast. This was his first lesson. Survival at all costs. Cutting loose anything that might hold him back. He knew not to struggle too much underwater, his new senses helped keep him calm, and his new hormones beat back the effects of the drug. And his sight was so good now that even as he sank deeper into the Gowanus, with the light of Brooklyn dwindling above him, he could still make out the knotted laces on the fancy white boots his mother's lover had given him.

He undid the laces. And only then did he struggle, like a graceless frog, to the surface, his body beating back the water instinctively. When he got free he pulled himself up next to the Union Street bridge and coughed up dirty water, then lay there hidden behind the carcass of a dead draft horse, thinking. He was disgusted. He'd liked those new white leather boots. He was like his mother; he liked nice things.

The leader of the Red Hook gang had been packed off to a children's refuge in Manhattan, which was what happened to suckers and weaklings, Spot thought. So the gang needed a leader. Good. Spot had what they needed. The rest of them didn't have what Spot had - not just better eyes, a powerful nose, strange bursts of strength. But smarts. Spot didn't kill them all. The ones who were scared enough to be loyal, fierce enough to be useful; these, he forgave. The rest washed up in the Canal within a week. When the leader came back, he did, too. He was eighteen. Spot was twelve.

Wallach's department store burned down, and two people died. Before they burned it Spot went through and picked out anything he wanted: new shoes, caps for his lieutenants, the key to the register, the money, a woman's ribbon from the apartment upstairs, a gold-topped cane.

No one was quite like Spot. Some of the Brooklyn boys quietly moved away because this scared them - Bert, now Racetrack, among them. Others, like Fingers, were taken out. Whenever Spot heard about a new alpha involved with the gangs, or even an upstart beta, terrible things started to happen. Because Spot wasn't stupid, and he didn't like competition. No kid in Brooklyn was like him. He wanted to keep it that way.

Which was why it was such a mystery that he never once made a play to take out Jack Kelly. Not even when Jack did stupid things like cross into his territory.

"Jacky's alright," he would say, with a gleam in his eye like he knew a secret. "Me and Jack, we have an understanding."

But he wasn't going to help Jack right away. He'd done a lot to help Jack already. Jack was really in his debt. He'd come looking for Punsly Schultz, former leader of the old Red Hook gang. He'd found Spot instead; that was better. Puns had never differentiated. He'd never quite had what Jack needed.


End file.
